Gillian Keegan caught on mic in foul mouthed rant over schools crisis: 'Others sat on their a***s!'

Shortly after the main body of the interview had concluded, Keegan, still wearing her microphone, criticised others and suggested the Government should be thanked for their response.

“Does anyone ever say, you know what, you’ve done a f***ing good job because everyone else has sat on their a**** and done nothing?” Keegan asked.

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She added: “Any sign of that, no?”

It comes after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak acknowledged hundreds more schools in England could be affected by crumbling concrete.

Sunak is facing accusations that hew failed to fund a programme to replace ageing classrooms.

He says 95 per cent of England’s schools remain unaffected, leaving open the possibility that more than a thousand could still be impacted by collapsing concrete concerns.

Pupils across the country face the prospect of being taught in temporary classrooms, on different sights or even a return to pandemic-style remote lessons.

Sunak said: “New information came to light relatively recently and it’s important that once it had, that the Government acted on it as swiftly as possible.

“Of course I know the timing is frustrating, but I want to give people a sense of the scale of what we are grappling with here: there are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this.”

By Sunak’s own figures, five per cent of schools being impacted would mean 1,100 are affected.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said : “I think the Prime Minister was providing reassurance to parents, pupils and schools that the vast majority – we believe more than 95% won’t be affected.”

He said Education Secretary Gillian Keegan had set out that “we expect the numbers to be in the hundreds, not thousands” but “while we are still waiting on schools to return their surveys and confirm their specific situations we can’t be more definitive”.

Keegan has spoken out on the footage leaking, admitting she was left “frustrated” by the interviewer.

“The interviewer was making out it was all my fault”, she said.

“I was saying, do you ever go into these interviews where anyone ever says anything but, ‘you’ve done a terrible job?’

“People shouldn’t thank me, but the department. They have taken on a leadership role.

“It wouldn’t normally be the department ordering portakabins, speaking to utility companies, speaking to surveyors directly, usually that would be the job of responsible bodies.

“Because we wanted to be proactive and reduce the time, we’ve done a lot of work.

“We’ve been working all over.”

A former top official at the Department for Education (DfE) suggested Sunak had turned down a request for funding to rebuild more schools while he was chancellor.

Jonathan Slater was permanent secretary at the DfE from May 2016 to August 2020, and claims the Treasury were wary of a “critical risk to life” threat if the schools programme was not funded.

Slater opened up on his “frustrations” at the DfE only being granted funding for 100 schools a year to have their concrete replaced, when he felt it should have been more around the 400 mark.

He told the BBC: “The actual ask in the Spending Review of 2021 was to double the 100 to 200 – that’s what we thought was going to be practical at first instance.

“I thought we’d get it, but the actual decision that the chancellor took in 2021 was to halve the size of the programme.”

Sunak has hit back at the claim, dubbing it “completely and utterly wrong”.

He told reporters: “Actually, one of the first things I did as chancellor, in my first spending review in 2020, was to announce a new 10-year school re-building programme for 500 schools.

“Now that equates to about 50 schools a year, that will be refurbished or rebuilt.

“If you look at what we have been doing over the previous decade, that’s completely in line with what we have always done.”